Hallandale Beach Blog -A common sense public policy overview offering a critical perspective on the current events, politics, government, public policy, sports scene and pop culture of Europe, Sweden, the U.S. & South Florida. In particular, Broward & Miami-Dade County, and the cities of Hallandale Beach & Hollywood.

Green Bay Coach Vince Lombardi; December 21, 1962Seven years later to the date of this cover, Lombardi coached hislast game, a losing effort for the Redskins.Nine months later he'd be dead of intestinal cancer at age 57.The Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at GeorgetownUniversity is named for him. See http://lombardi.georgetown.edu/It's located near the French and German Embassies on Reservoir Road.

Zonk! Miami Massacres Minnesota

Larry Csonka, January 21, 1974

Miami All The Way

Bob Griese, January 22, 19731972 Miami Dolphins team photo at The Orange Bowl

The same color photo of the 17-0 Undefeated Team that for six years,rested in a frame on top of my bedroom dresser at my home in NorthMiami Beach. There it stayed 'till that fateful day in August of 1979,when I began packing for my new life in Bloomington. The photo madethe trip to Bloomington intact, where it remained on my desk inBriscoe Quad 427-A for two very eventful years at IU, the latter.1980-'81 being the year we beat North Carolina for the NCAA title.I placed the photo right below my 8' x 11' b&w glossy of the MiamiHerald's All-County Gymnastics team that I got from the HeraldSports Dept. That was a tremendously talented team that featuredmany friends of mine from all over Dade County -like the late DeeLeutner of Hialeah Miami Lakes, my charming, sweet friend andfuture Georgia GymDog, who sat next to me when we took the SATsin the NMB cafeteria, and smiled at me and said "Good luck" rightbefore we opened the test- as well as my own talented friends andclassmates at North Miami Beach High, like Lisa Martin, KarenGinsberg and Linda Zobler -the best of the best.

Last year, it was a Hoosier who led the way to the Lombardi Trophy...

Above, former IU Hoosier and Saints 2008 Number TwoDraft Pick Tracy Porter makes the play of the game andintercepts Peyton Manning and scores a TD against theColts during Super Bowl XLIV in Miami, leading the Saintsto their first Super Bowl 31-17, Feb. 7, 2010.

With the 11th pick in this year's Draft, if he's still available,as Charley Casserly expects him to be as of late Wedesdaynight,the Dolphins should take dynamic Clemson RBC.J. Spiller,the single-most exciting player I've seenin years and whoconsistently made big plays whenbig plays needed to bemade.Almost single-handedly last year, Spiller defeated theHurricanes in a way that showed how woebegone theMiamidefense and special teams had become, as heseemingly toyed with them time and again.

If he has already been selected, they should select a playerwho most approaches Bears Hall of Famer Mike Singletary,a player who had zeal, smarts and intuition, and who playsall-out on every play and won't tolerate slacking in histeammates.That would likely be TexasLBSergio Kindle.The lack of mental and physical toughness in the Dolphinsdefense the past ten years has been one of the most gallingaspects of their decline into mediocrity for longtime Dolphinfans like me, who have lived long enough to know what asolid defense actually looks like.It's NOT what we have now.

Their inability to consistently pass rush, tackle and fieldopportunistic ball-hawks just leaves you dumbfounded at times.It's nice to beat the Patriots once a year, but one good gamedoes not a season make.

With their second round pick, if he's available -andSpillerhas gone elsewhere- the Dolphins ought to select StanfordRB and HeismanTrophy runner-up Toby Gerhart beforethe Patriots snap him up.

At New England, Gerhart would become the latest Dolphin-killer as he becomes the player who alwaysleads the Patriots to late-game victories, year-after-year,with his versatility: powerful goal-line plunges, scampersdown the sidelines on draw plays, or swing passes wherehe -shocker!- beats Dolphins' LBs, and you're screamingat your TV even before he scores a TD to kill the Dolphinsonce again.Made worse because we could've taken him.

I suppose it's worth reminding you here given recent newsthat I've never been a Jason Taylor fan, and wanted himgone years ago when he could still demand something in atrade.

I remind you how lacking he was in leadership at the veryend of Cam Cameron's painful one and only year as headcoach, when some leadership was needed and yet frommost accounts, Taylor sat by and did nothing when defensiveteammates cursed-out coaches on plane flights, includingCameron, and played out-of-control during games,as if they didn't know their assignments.Or simply didn't care anymore.

His coddled status irked me to no end and probably did himno favors with Bill Parcells, either.

But what really irked me about him was the clueless rhetoricdown here on sports talk radio about him and Canton, asreal NFL fans around the country who know their historyknow that Taylor was simply not as good or dominant asformer Bears great Richard Dent, a Super Bowl MVP,who twenty years later, unbelievably, is still NOT in thePro Football Hall of Fame, even though he should've gottenin MANY years ago.

If a dominant player of his era like Dent, who dominatedgood-to-great offensive teams like the 49ers, Redskins andGiants is STILL not in all these years later, JasonTaylorought to make himself comfortable, as he's in for a very,very long wait -IF he ever gets in, which I think is unlikely.

South Beach Hoosier Trivia:My first Dolphin game at the Orange Bowl came in Decemberof 1970, aged 9, a 45-3 win over Buffalo that propelled theminto their first ever playoff appearance.

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Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and insight onto Florida and local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now. On this blog, locally, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger and laser-like attention on the coastal cities of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.

If you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be stuck in stultifying traffic, paying higher-than-necessary taxes and continually musing about the chronic lack of accountability among not only elected govt. officials, but also of city, county and state employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, eager work-ethic mentality that local residents deserve and expect.

This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the "Perfect Storm" of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.Sadly for its residents, HB is where even easily-solved, quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and ineffective supervisory management. It's a city with lots of potential because of its terrific location, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion, merely kicked -once again- further down the road.

I used to ask myself, not always rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show that through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?" Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable but skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time, and wanting questions answered in a honest and logical way that citizens have the right to expect.

Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack ofPUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITYhere among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials.Hallandale Beach Blogaims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of follow-up investigation and public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or simple negligence -South Florida's usual governing style.

"And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."-Preacher Purl encouraging the underdog Hickory High basketball team before the state title game against heavily-favored South Bend Central in 1986'sHoosiers

Bill Cooke of @Random_Pixels has the article, Paradise Lost? South Florida

Hallandale Beach Blog

Hallandale Beach Blog/South Beach Hoosier's crimson-colored Indiana University cap. If you see someone at a South Florida govt. meeting or public policy discussion wearing this IU cap, scribbling notes furiously -and shaking his head in disbelief- don't be afraid to come over and say hello or pitch prospective story ideas. Photo by South Beach Hoosier. Move your mouse over the cap and be sent to the IU Athletic Dept.'s YouTube Channel.

In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation

In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...

"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I,"John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administrations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly. At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accommodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...

In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated...

So this is where our tax dollars go to die?

"So this is where our tax dollars go to die? My friend and fellow civic activist Csaba Kulin, perhaps wondering when we're FINALLY going to get the clean and inviting public beach that Hallandale Beach residents believe we're entitled to but have never received under Mayor Cooper and her Rubber Stamp Crew.

"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"

"Laws and Constitutions go for nothing where the general sentiment is corrupt."-New York Times,September 22, 1851

"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"

-Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper at April 2, 2008 HB City Commission meeting, in discussing possible inclusion of Broward County Charter Review Commission's proposal for Ethics Commission to deal with Broward County Commission, on November 2008 ballot.

Six YEARS after the county's voters had overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the County charter requiring its adoption, the Broward County Commission had yet to live up to its legal responsibility. That's why!

North Miami Beach Senior High School, the Home of the Chargers

Before I was a Hoosier, I was an NMB Charger, Class of 1979

Sebastian the Ibis, the U-M mascot

Like longtime U-M fans everywhere, including me, Sebastian the Ibis, the U-M mascot, hasn't had very much to cheer about lately, given the general state of mediocrity and underwhelming performances coming from the Hurricanes. Isn't it about time for fans to finally see some tangible signs that the new AD is moving things in the right direction? Where are the signs? I'm NOT seeing them. The woeful U-M Women's program is largely composed of teams that are NOT even close to being competitive for NCAA titles like their ACC competition, and they don't even field Women's Lacrosse or Field Hockey teams. It's embarrassing! Click on Sebastian for retrospective photo gallery of The Orange Bowl

A dynamic and original talent with personality to spare!

Photo above is from my June 2nd, 2013 post titled, "Our 'Full of Keys' drought is finally over! Full of Keys (a.k.a. the amazing Anni Bernhard) will be playing a showcase in New York City at Cake Shop on June 10th as part of the week-long New Music Seminar. Her new album was recorded recently in Gotland, will be mastered in NYC, aiming for a September release -with lots of very big and exciting plans coming soon! @FullOfKeys, @AndreasJismark, #AnniBernhard, #MatsJönsson, #GrazingGrounds, #NMS2013, #NYMF, #CakeShop"
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/our-full-of-keys-drought-is-finally.html

Click the photo to read that post, watch her videos and learn more about this dynamic and original talent with personality to spare!

Singer/songwriter Full of Keys (Anni Bernhard)

Singer/songwriter Full of Keys (Anni Bernhard) wearing the teal-colored Miami Dolphins cap I gave her in January 2013 (in Stockholm) while recording her 2nd album, "The Grazing Grounds" at Sandkvie Studios in Visby, Gotland, Sweden. Also pictured here are sound engineer and co-producer Linus Larsson and musician/DJ/co-producer Mats Jönsson, April 12, 2013. Click the photo to see my post on Anni last summer.

Let's end the 27-year NCAA title drought!

IU All-American and U.S. Olympian Steve Alford on the cover of the 1987 Indiana University basketball media guide, months after IU won the NCAA basketball title.

The NCAA Championship Banners

Assembly Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. I was there in 1981 for NCAA Title #4 vs. North Carolina. Click on photo to go to the IU Basketball homepage.